Book review of The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan

In her newest spellbinding assortment of poems, The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan renders wealthy, intricate landscapes of heritage and place that come up from her personal experiences. A Palestinian American novelist, poet and medical psychologist, Alyan is conversant in diaspora and displacement. Born in America, she moved to Kuwait along with her Palestinian father and Syrian mom, then returned to the American Midwest after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. She accomplished some of her schooling within the U.S. and a few within the Middle East.

These poems mirror not solely the nations that make up Alyan’s id and historical past, but additionally the vary of cultural beliefs and variations that exist inside that historical past, exploring the views of members of the family comparable to her maternal grandmother and her mom. Alyan’s poetry attracts the reader in by kind, together with interactive poems styled in a choose-your-own-adventure format.

Alyan tackles complicated, even disturbing, subjects. She writes of on a regular basis objects utilizing placing, vivid descriptions: “underwear the color of the summer, of the ocean, of the dead.” “In Jerusalem” employs the recurring picture of a girl’s hair. It’s sensual, female and highly effective, however it might probably additionally render the speaker susceptible: “In Jerusalem a man blocked the door of a hostel // to tell me to unpin my hair. I did, / but then kept the story from anyone for years.”

While her succinct and candid language, arresting imagery and daring method to kind are successfully disquieting, there may be additionally a really natural sense of hope and renewal in these poems, even within the darkest hour. There’s a touch of this within the titular line from, “Interactive Fiction :: Werewolf,” the place Alyan writes: “In the / darkest dark, I wait for / the / moon // that turns you back.”

The Moon That Turns You Back is a bountiful assortment of poetry, particularly for these inquisitive about diaspora and the complexity of multinationalism.